


stumble on a secret power

by pinkdementors



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Female Friendship, Gen, Ginny Weasley-centric, Implied/Referenced Abuse, POV Female Character, Women Being Awesome, journalist ginny i would die for you
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-31
Updated: 2019-10-31
Packaged: 2021-01-03 06:48:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,496
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21175184
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pinkdementors/pseuds/pinkdementors
Summary: All stories have a beginning. This is one of them: the diary, the girl, the quill dipped in ink.Don’t trust a magical object if you can’t see where it keeps its brain,Arthur would admonish months later, but Ginny had grown up in a house crammed with unknown magic, had no memory of a life separate from talking mirrors and singing teapots and the tinny complaints of Great-Uncle Alfie’s chess set. She was just turned eleven years old, and she wanted a friend. Was this to be her crime?





	stumble on a secret power

**Author's Note:**

> title and inspiration from lorde's "writer in the dark".

_The books were becausesomething happened_

_that gutted us of words. They were not to help us_

_or restore what we had lost. They were a place_

_to put our emptinessa center_

_that might hold._

\- _Notes Toward an Elegy, _or_ What The Books Were For, _Hannah Aizenman

***

Maybe it starts like this: one summer afternoon, Ginny upends her shopping bag over her bed to find a small dark notebook nestled amidst the brilliant rainbow of Lockhart’s glossy covers.

Isn’t that how the stories go? A poison apple, a sharpened needle, a magic mirror. Wickedness lurking underneath the glassy promise of something beautiful and sweet. Trust who you shouldn’t, and get what you deserve.

(Don’t worry. We will tell you who to trust.)

***

The truth of it is, Ginny Weasley grew up keeping diaries. It was a hobby born from growing up in a small house, nine people having nineteen tangled conversations over the dinner table, everyone always struggling to get a word in. The Weasleys were the sort of family where you had to speak up loud to be heard.

(Girls who talk too much get called a lot of things. _Chatterbox_, that old primary-school insult, and then later _airhead, gossip, flirt, whiny, shrill. _Ginny just had a lot to say, and no one to listen.)

To be a writer is to be a reader. Arthur would bring home yellowing paperbacks from the Muggle village nearest the Burrow: Shakespeare and Austen and the Bronte sisters, _Nancy Drew_ and Tamora Pierce and the court of Camelot. In Ginny’s notebooks she turned them inside-out, wrote her own worlds into them; Lancelot and Galahad questing alongside Sir Percy the Pompous and Bill the Brave. In the books she was Ginevra the Good Witch, beloved by all, and she had magic at her fingertips and adventure written into her very destiny.

***

All stories have a beginning. This is one of them: the diary, the girl, the quill dipped in ink.

(_Don’t trust a magical object if you can’t see where it keeps its brain, _Arthur would admonish months later, but Ginny had grown up in a house crammed with unknown magic, had no memory of a life separate from talking mirrors and singing teapots and the tinny complaints of Great-Uncle Alfie’s chess set. She was just turned eleven years old, and she wanted a friend. Was this to be her crime?)

_My name is Ginny Weasley, _Ginny prints on the first page. The words disappear and bloom back onto the paper, dark and shining, made anew: _Hello, Ginny. My name is Tom Riddle._

(_I was a child, _Ginny thinks years later. _I was a child and I didn’t know any better. _No matter how many times she repeats it to herself, it always sounds like an accusation.)

_Hello, Tom, _she writes back.

(Remember the part about beginnings.)

***

The ceiling of the Great Hall towers above her, the ceiling swirling with constellations. Ginny cranes her neck up, up, and forces herself not to stare at the tight knot of red-and-gold where generations and generations of Weasleys have sat before her.

_Weasley, Ginny _is the very last name to be called. The brim of the Sorting Hat drops over her eyes, and the world goes dark.

_What have we here? _The Hat murmurs. It’s a little creepy, having another voice in her head. _You’re a sharp one, no question, nice solid work ethic. And— cunning, and ambition, oh yes; you want to _be _someone, don’t you? You want the world to sit up and pay attention when you walk into a room. There’s a House that would serve you well for that, Miss Weasley, if you so desire. _

Ginny holds her breath, terrified, certain.

_But would you look at that, _the Hat says, and it sounds almost mournful now. Like it knows something she doesn’t. _Courage, and what a lot of it. You’ll need that, Ginny Weasley, and it’ll serve you well in— _

“GRYFFINDOR!”

***

This is what it means to be poor at Hogwarts: boys’ pajamas, and hand-me-down robes that are always too long in the sleeves, and when Ginny finds out she brought the wrong edition of her History of Magic textbook she has to keep going to the library between classes to do her reading instead of sending for a new one.

This is what it also means — gazes in the hallway that seem to linger a little too long—murmurs of _another _Weasley? whenever she introduces herself to older students— Draco Malfoy’s cutting glare between lessons, loudly reminding the hallway that her father was _under investigation_, and by his _own department, _can you _imagine _the things those Weasleys get up to at home—

Ginny is no shrinking violet by nature. But over time small grievances pile up like snowdrifts, each day more weighted than the last. The other girls in her dormitory (Meg, Farha, dark-eyed Demelza) are nice, but when she thinks about confiding in them something stills in her chest. Once, someone told Ginny she talked too much, and that sort of thing stays with you.

_Dear Tom, _she finds herself writing, more and more. _Dear Tom, I was the only one in my class who couldn’t turn a toothpick into a needle. Dear Tom, Ron won’t sit by me at dinner anymore. Dear Tom, I miss my parents more than I thought I would. _

Tom is patient, kind, a cool comfort. From his own life, he paints a picture Ginny would never have expected—a lonely boy raised in a Muggle orphanage, too poor for anything more than second-hand robes. _I found _real _friends in my later years at Hogwarts, Ginny, _Tom says, his words slanting and lovely. _I know you will too. _

Ginny stares at the dark ink, shining bright on cream paper, and feels something in her stomach ease. _Tell me more, _she writes, and the days slip by unnoticed.

***

One rainy afternoon, Tom says: _would you like to see my memories? _

He shows her a warm summer day, a group of boys unfamiliar to her clustered on the banks of the lake. Even without seeing him she knows which one is Tom—he is the center figure, dark-haired and handsome, and the other boys lean towards him like flowers to the sun. Ginny sits by the water’s edge and digs her fingers into the grass, letting the light and conversation and Tom’s laughter envelop her in a shining soap bubble.

She wakes with the warm flush of sunlight still on her skin, and Tom more real and perfect than he had ever been before.

***

A story Ginny had read once, in a book of Beedle’s tales: a young, handsome warlock whose heart had been left outside his body for so long it had turned evil and animal. _Put it back, _begged the girl he wanted to marry, and so he had. But the old heart was a dark and dangerous thing, and even as it beat in his chest the warlock wanted a heart that was human and whole. And so he looked to the girl, and picked up his dagger. 

This was how the story ended: the warlock cutting out the girl’s heart and his own. Dying in a pool of each other’s blood, both their hearts in the warlock’s grasping hands.

(_I have seen your heart, _Tom would tell Ginny’s brother one day, _and it is mine. _As children Ron and Ginny had both turned up their noses at the girl’s foolishness. They were not the trusting sort, and they did not know yet how easy it was to offer a soul for the taking.)

***

_I feel tired, _she writes to Tom. _I don’t understand why I’m always tired all the time, I’m sleeping for hours and hours and missing all my morning classes._

_I’m sure it will pass, _Tom replies. _Get some rest, Ginny._

Her dreams are strange and chilling: spiders scuttling over her sheets, red paint dripping down her bed hangings, her fingernails bleeding at the beds. Ginny opens her mouth to scream and a low, strangled hiss comes out. She wakes up sweating, shaking, and pretends she doesn’t remember anything.

_***_

Ginny likes to imagine if Tom were real, more than ink and words and paper, more than just the boy who lived in her diary. In her daydreams he walks with her between classes, eats breakfast opposite her in the Great Hall, his smile unfurling warm and easy like it had in his sun-filled memories.

_I think you understand me better than anyone else, _she writes to him, and can tell by the curl to his letters that he’s pleased when he writes _I think we understand each other, don’t you?_

***

_Dear Tom, I woke up and there was blood on my hands and there were some feathers on my nightgown. This morning Hagrid said someone strangled all the roosters in the night. I think it was me. I think there’s something wrong with me. _

***

Sometimes when Ginny closes her eyes it feels like there’s something else in her head, like a dark spot blooming just beyond her field of vision. Sometimes when she opens them again it’s gone from light to dark outside, and the last six hours are a careful blank in her memory. At night she puts her diary carefully away in her bedside drawer and the next morning it’s open on her nightstand, the page heavy with words she doesn’t remember writing.

(In the books, Ophelia sang dirges and braided flowers into her hair; Persephone smiled and licked pomegranate juice off her fingers; the patterns in the wallpaper swirled and beckoned. By the time you went mad, it was too late. You had already lost something of yourself, and you could never get it back.)

She starts seeing Tom, in the corner of her eye. At first he’s just a shadow, a suggestion of a boy, but then slowly he grows more and more solid, until one day she glances up from her textbook and he’s standing there, smiling at her, the candles casting shadows on his pale face and dark hungry eyes._ (Dear Tom, what’s happening to me?)_

She blinks, and he’s gone. The next day she tries to destroy the diary, and a week later she steals it back.

_(What happened, Ginny? I thought we were friends. I thought you cared for me._

_I know. I was scared. I’m sorry. _

_I would never hurt you. Don’t forget that.)_

***

In the end, it goes like this: Ginny goes to sleep, and wakes up in the middle of the night to a boy sitting on the end of her bed. Tom is sharper and more beautiful than he had been in her memories, his pale face glowing in the moonlight. He smiles, and his voice enters her head like her own.

“Hello, Ginny. It’s so nice to finally meet you.”

Tom sends her to sleep for most of it, but this she remembers: the horrible, sinking feeling of not being in control of her body, her limbs moving jerkily and awkwardly like a puppet on strings. Her hand, tracing the letters on the wall, her death note sealed in red paint.

She comes to in the Chamber, the stone cool and damp under her skin. Above her Harry is shaking, exhausted, a diary and a dripping fang clutched in his grimy hands. “Riddle’s finished,” he says, and Ginny starts to cry.

In Dumbledore’s office, she stares at the floor and avoids her parents’ concerned glances, thinking of how stupid she’d been, how foolish. _There has been no lasting damage done, _Dumbledore says, and Ginny spreads her ink-stained hands and wonders when they’ll ever be clean.

They go home.

***

Ginny has two secrets.

Number one: after another day spent avoiding her mother’s concerned glances and her father’s guilty voice she escapes to her room, only to find the desk chair already occupied.

“Hello, Ginny,” Tom says.

“You’re dead,” Ginny replies, because she had seen the proof herself, the punctured diary, the sword gleaming bright in Harry’s dirt-covered hands.

“Maybe,” Tom says, shrugging one elegant shoulder. He looks around, his gaze raking over Ginny’s room with its pale pink walls, the faded Holyhead Harpies poster over her desk, then back at her. “And yet here I am.”

Ginny doesn’t know what to say. She wants to scream, shout, throw something. She wants to hurt him like he hurt her. She wants to run away from this room and never come back. “Why did you do it?” she asks instead. “I thought you were my friend.”

Tom’s voice is kind, and his gaze is steady when he says, “Why did you believe me?”

But he stays away the next night, and the next, until Ginny can convince herself that he was just a hallucination. The last vestiges of the diary, leaving her life.

She moves through the Burrow like a ghost, like a shell of herself. Eat, sleep, say good morning to Fred and George and Ron and Percy, ignore her father’s concerned frown and her mother’s uncharacteristic gentleness, repeat. She takes long, scorching showers and stands in the steam-fogged bathroom, watching her face cloud over and disappear.

In the story, the warlock’s heart was kept outside of its body for so long that it turned dark and grasping and greedy. Tom had spent an entire year draining away her soul, and Harry had brought it back to her with a single strike of a basilisk fang. What does it do to you, Ginny wonders, when you live apart from your soul for so long? One girl had walked, terrified, down into that Chamber and another had dragged herself out. Who is this stranger in the mirror, returned to herself?

***

“Hey. _Hey, _Ginny. Wake up.”

Late summer, the sky heavy with stars. Ginny blinks away sleep to see Fred— George? No, definitely Fred— hovering above her, freckled face pale in the moonlight.

“Come on,” he whispers, and gives her a little shove. “We’re going on an adventure.”

Ginny doesn’t particularly want to get out of bed but she does it anyway, tugging on a dressing gown and shoving her feet into trainers. They move quietly, undisturbed, down the Burrow’s wooden stairs and out into the chilly yard towards the broomshed, where George is waiting with three brooms and a colorful box.

“Look alive,” he tells Ginny easily, handing her Charlie’s old Comet, and then winces like he regrets the choice of words. She takes the broom before he can apologize.

There are no words to describe flying, never have been. There is only joy, thrill, the heady feeling of weightlessness. Ginny goes up, up, _up_,reveling in the goosebumps that break out over her skin. Charlie’s broom is warm, the wood vibrating softly under her fingers, and it reminds her of a thousand years ago, her childish fingers picking the broomshed lock for the first time, the quiet wonder of first flight.

Fred pulls up his own broom beside her, little box in hand. “Look inside,” he tells her. In the dark, it takes her a moment to understand what she’s seeing—the triangular heads and long, pointed tails, each a different color. It’s not until Ginny reads the print on the side that she understands. _Dr. Filibuster’s Fabulous, Wet-Start, No-Heat Fireworks. _

There are approximately one million reasons why this is a bad idea, most of them starting with _Mum _and ending with _Mum_. And yet here she is, reaching for a match, Fred’s grin a knife’s edge in the moonlight. 

For one silent, heavy moment they watch the little light arc through the dark sky, winking at them. Ten seconds, twenty, thirty, and then the world bursts into color: golden starbursts and rose-pink Catherine wheels and striking ice-blue flares, all of them blooming like jagged flowers in the night, suspended in their glory, making her breath catch in her throat with the beauty and the thrill of it.

(Molly wakes up after Fred sends off the second Catherine wheel, and her shouts boom through the house loud enough to rival the fireworks themselves. Ginny thinks it’s worth it, though, for the way George elbows her across the breakfast table the next morning, Ron complaining loudly about having missed all the fun, the memory of the broom under her hands, solid and grounding, bringing her back to herself.)

***

They go to Egypt, and Ginny leaves Tom behind in the sun and sand and scorching heat. When she comes back it is nearly the end of summer, the days stretching out to their longest, fullest length. On sleepless nights, her head filled with Parseltongue and petrified cats, Ginny steals out to the broomshed and lets the cool air clear her head.

In Diagon Alley the Weasleys meet up with Harry. He smiles politely at her, says hello, and keeps talking to Ron. It’s not the worst thing he could have done— she was imagining anger in his expression, or worse, pity—but afterwards she stares at her hands for a long time, listening to them whisper in the room next door. Whatever had happened in the Chamber, Harry had clearly gotten over it, so why couldn’t she?

***

The night before Ginny goes to Hogwarts, she sees Tom again. He’s sitting on her bed, more insubstantial this time, the light from her desk lamp filtering through him slightly. She throws a wadded-up sock at him, and he flickers a little but stays put.

“Why are you here,” Ginny says, tired.

Tom spreads out his hands. “You bring me here.”

There’s nothing to say to that, so she keeps packing, folding up robes and scarves and socks and shoving them into her trunk, not looking up.

“Do you think this year will be better?” Tom asks lightly, watching her.

_Yes, _Ginny starts to say, but the words catch in her throat. Can she really say that, with all the nights she wakes up with blood in her mouth, all the times she’s seen Tom in her sleep? She’s starting her second year at Hogwarts tomorrow and she doesn’t have a single friend there.

“Yes,” she tries, and then, shakily, “I don’t know. But I don’t want you here.” There’s a pressure building behind her eyes and she presses her hand against them, not wanting to give him the satisfaction of seeing her cry.

Tom’s eyes are sharp. “Stop lying.”

Something in Ginny shoves, snaps. “_You’re _the liar,” she says, hating her own wobbling voice. “You’re the one who used me, not the other way around. I trusted you, and you _hurt _me, and I want you to go away.”

Tom gets off the bed, his motions easy and elegant, the lamplight shifting around him so he seems more defined than before. “If I hurt you,” he murmurs, “it was because you allowed me to. If I used you, it was because you wanted me to. What was it you said? _Dear Tom, sometimes I wish you were real _—”

“Stop it,” Ginny says, quietly.

“You wanted this, Ginny.” Tom’s already fading, his voice thin and transparent. “You wanted to make me real. You can forget that, but I never will.”

(_You wanted to make me real: _that was the second secret.)

***

Ginny gets a new Herbology partner her very first day of second year. Luna Lovegood has a lot of unbrushed blonde hair and a permanently wide-eyed expression. When Ginny sticks out her hand in introduction, Luna covers it in both her cool palms and smiles so widely that it’s impossible not to smile back.

Luna, Ginny finds quickly, is impossibly strange and also impossibly kind. Her pale hands move quickly and easily in the cool soil of the greenhouses, and as they work she tells Ginny stories of the creatures her father’s researching, more things in heaven and earth. After lessons they spill out onto the castle grounds and wander to the very edges of the Forbidden Forest, searching for Luna’s creatures.

People call Luna mad. _Loony Lovegood, _they say in the hallways, _get away from her, quick, you might catch it too! _But Ginny had been mad, once, and no one had listened. Luna’s world is full of lovely, curious, living things: fire-lilies and jewel-encrusted frogs and the low, sonorous bellow of the Erumpent. There were worse things to imagine than something beautiful.

***

“Are those the_ Harpies?_”

Ginny’s hand stills over the corner of her faded Holyhead poster, pin still in hand. She turns, slowly, to find Demelza Robins standing near the foot of Ginny’s bed, arms crossed in front of her chest. She’s got her bookbag in one hand, clearly returned early from lunch.

“Yes,” Ginny says, defensiveness already rising sharp on her tongue. The Harpies poster— sun-bleached, curling at the corners— is her pride and joy, an old birthday present from Bill.

But Demelza just smiles, enthusiasm making her cheeks dimple. “I _love _the Harpies,” she says sincerely. “Who’s your favorite, then? I think Gwenog Jones can’t be beat, personally, but then did you hear how Jordan Lin pulled off that feint in their last match—”

“I didn’t know you liked Quidditch,” Demelza says, later, both of them cross-legged on their respective beds. “How come I never saw you out on the pitch last year?”

Ginny looks away, cheeks flaring red. “I don’t have a broom. And I was … kind of distracted last year,” she says stiffly. _Please don’t ask me about it. _

Now it’s Demelza who looks a bit embarrassed. “I know,” she says, and takes a deep breath, her dark eyes intent on Ginny’s face. “And Ginny— I’m sorry. We, Meg and Farha and I, we should have noticed, we should have paid attention … said something …”

It’s not the first time Ginny’s heard the sentiment. She’s felt it all summer, from Percy and Ron and the twins, the weight of it apparent in every one of their clumsy, too-careful gestures. But this is the first time someone’s looked her in the eye and said _I’m sorry, _and it makes something jagged and painful claw its way up her throat.

“It wasn’t your fault,” she says quietly, and for a moment they’re silent together.

Demelza’s the first to speak up. “Well,” she says, a little bit of forced cheer in her voice. “I just got a new broom over the summer and I’ve still got my old one with me. If you … you know. We could go together.”

_Charity, _Tom spits venomously in her head. _She pities you, _but Demelza’s eyes are kind and free of expectation. She remembers the summer, cold air and stars, the fireworks warm in her chest.

“Okay,” she promises, and Demelza beams like the sun.

***

Tom says, _everyone knows what you did. _

Tom says, _they’ll never trust you again. _

Demelza wakes her up early on stormy mornings to sneak onto the Quidditch pitch, diving through the hoops and whooping as their fingers grow numb from cold.

In Herbology they learn about Mandrakes and their uses. Ginny stares at the floor, ears burning, and resists the urge to hide her face in her gardening gloves; Luna pats her arm serenely and launches into a loud, one-sided discussion about Stubby Boardman that distracts everyone in the surrounding vicinity.

Tom smiles at her, sitting cross-legged on her Hogwarts trunk, and Ginny says, _go away, go away, go away. _

***

A year later, a year wiser. Ginny rides the train home, her trunk stuffed with socks and robes and drawings from Luna, a Herbology project she’d received an ‘Outstanding’ on, a scribbled address in London with a promise from Demelza to write.

***

The Quidditch World Cup is the best thing she’s ever seen, hands down.

All around the Minister’s box the world glimmers green and leprechaun gold, but Ginny only has eyes for the match. When _Troy-Mullet-Moran _score the first goal for Ireland, the stadium explodes into a roar so loud she can feel the echo in her chest. _This, _Ginny thinks, fireworks erupting somewhere in her stomach. _I want this. _

She turns to look at her family and meets eyes with Harry, who looks equally awed, a giddy delight on his face that surely matches her own. They lean into each other and spend the rest of the match screaming themselves hoarse for both sides, Harry’s shoulder pressed warm into hers, the world lit up around them.

***

Professor Moody brings out three spiders at the beginning of their very first Defense lesson, and by the end two of them are dead. Ginny stares at the third, _Imperiused _spider, its hairy legs jerking in a grotesque, unwilling dance, and tries not to think about her hands dragging a paintbrush over cold stone walls.

“Constant vigilance,” Moody growls at them afterward, tipping the last spider into a jar. “That’s the only way to protect yourself from the Dark Arts. Better to be paranoid than complacent, because complacency makes you vulnerable. Gets you _killed_.” He glares furiously at all of them, magical eye whizzing frantically in its socket.

Ginny wonders if Moody, too, knows about the Chamber. Perhaps that bulging eye is focusing on her, object lesson in making oneself vulnerable. Lupin had known, but he had been kind, and given her chocolate to take back to her room, and never said anything to her to her for going weak-kneed and pale when the dementors came.

(Ginny, like everyone else, read the _Prophet _article that said Lupin was a werewolf, a beast unfit to teach children and a danger to society . She had gone to find him afterwards, but his office was already locked and empty of his things. _You’re like me, _she’d wanted to tell him. _You live with something dark, that doesn’t make you evil, it doesn’t._)

After the lesson she hangs back while everyone else streams out the door. Moody’s peering into the glass mirror on his desk, but his magical eye remains fixedly pointed at her the whole time. Ginny folds her arms over her chest and waits.

Finally, he glances up at her, seeming rather uninterested. “Weasley, isn’t it?”

Ginny nods. “I had a question, about the Imperius curse.” When Moody doesn’t say anything in response, she pushes onward. “Is there any way to— block it?”

Moody’s turned his full attention to her now, brow furrowed into something unreadable. “Block it? No. Resisting it— now that’s possible. Not easy, though. You need mental fortitude, willpower, an unwillingness to bow to authority. There’s not many full-grown wizards that can do it.” He pauses. “Or witches, for that matter.” 

There’s something grating about the way he says _or witches, _but Ginny stows it away for later, leaving before Moody can ask more questions. She has the information she wanted. Outside the classroom she pauses, closing her eyes, remembering. _Mental fortitude, willpower, an unwillingness to bow to authority. _This, then, is who she needs to become.

***

Dumbledore’s goblet spits out Cedric’s name, and then Harry’s.

Ginny feels a surge of pity as she watches Harry weave his way up to the front of the Great Hall. He looks small in front of the gaping crowd, panicked and vulnerable. It’s easy to remember the boy who’d climbed down into the Chamber for her, how terrified he’d been, his knuckles white around the hilt of Gryffindor’s sword. She doesn’t know Harry well, but she knows enough to be sure he doesn’t want this.

The Hogwarts rumour mill, of course, has no such mercy, and within days stories are flying around the halls: Potter had bribed Dumbledore, he had tricked the cup, he had learned Dark Arts, he was being a sore loser about last year’s match against Hufflepuff. The last one happens to be passed along by two students walking behind Ginny, and so they’re caught off their guard when she whirls around, suddenly furious, snapping, “And Gryffindor won the cup that year, so maybe _you’re_ the ones who’re still sore about it!”

The student who’d spoken stops mid-step. It’s an older Hufflepuff boy, someone she doesn’t recognize. He flushes angrily when he sees he’s been chastised by a third year.

“And what’s it to you?” he jeers, crossing his arms. “Potter won’t take you to the Yule Ball for eavesdropping in corridors, you know, you’ll have to do more than that to get his attention —”

Ginny reels, an old, familiar surge of embarrassment flooding over her, making her cheeks burn crimson. She steps forward, fully intending to tear after him, but she’s stopped by a cool hand on her shoulder.

“Ginny,” Hermione says, coming up behind her and squeezing her shoulder gently. “Come on. It’s not worth it.” Ginny nods and blinks hard, wishing away the hot tears that have sprung to her eyes. She doesn’t know what’s come over her, why a few casually dropped words are leaving her feeling so small. _You’ll have to do more than that to get his attention. _

Hermione seems to understand the situation and leads her out of the hallway, into an empty girls’ bathroom. Ginny takes the moment to wash her face in the sink, letting the running water cool her stinging cheeks. When she’s done drying her hands Hermione is still there, watching her, and Ginny has no idea what to say.

“Thanks,” she says finally. “I didn’t mean for that to happen, out there. I just —” She pauses, unable to articulate what about those careless words had stung so much. Was it what he’d been saying about Harry? The implication that Ginny was only defending him because she had a crush on him? Or maybe— this was the worst part— maybe it was the truth embedded in it, the feelings that she’d buried for dead after the Chamber but had stayed there, embedded somewhere deep inside her regardless. Famous Harry Potter. The schoolgirl crush she’d never gotten over.

“I know,” Hermione says quietly, and that makes Ginny feel even worse. “Listen, Ginny…” she rocks forward on her feet, looking a little awkward, and Ginny realizes that this is the most personal moment they’ve ever shared. “Have you ever thought about, you know— moving on? You know. Dating other people.” Hermione gives her a little smile. “Being yourself.”

“Being myself,” Ginny repeats.

“It’s just…” Hermione hesitates. “I know you like Harry. But he’ll never notice you if you don’t ease up around him. I’ve seen you with your friends, Ginny, you’re funny, you talk and you make jokes and people _like you_. But you don’t do that around Harry. And for what it’s worth,” she adds firmly, “I think you two could be friends.”

Friends_. _It’s not really something she’d ever considered, being a friend to Harry, who is nearly infamous around Gryffindor Tower for how private he is, how guarded, how much of his time is spent in the exclusive company of Ron and Hermione. But Hermione is Harry’s best friend, and here she is, fixing her dark brown eyes on Ginny, telling her to move on. And she was right, wasn’t she? After Tom Ginny had vowed to never give anyone that power over her again— and here she was, crying in a bathroom over a stupid boy.

“You’re right,” she says finally, and means _thank you. _And then, just to break the tension: “_Friends _like you and Ron, right?”

Hermione’s indignant splutter echoes through the whole bathroom, and Ginny grins. She’s not sure about Harry, but she thinks she might have one more friend already. 

***

_Move on. _Hermione’s voice echoes in her ears through the next few months, as Hogwarts slowly descends into Yule Ball fever. _Move on, _as Ginny sits in class and pays careful attention to Moody’s lecture on defensive hexes; _move on, _as she races over the tops of the greenhouses and skirts the edge of the Forbidden Forest on one of Demelza’s borrowed brooms, their breath coming out in clouds in the cold winter air. _Move on, _she thinks, clutching fistfuls of the weeds around her Flitterbloom plant while Luna weaves the flapping blossoms into her hair.

It’s why, after this particular lesson, she stumbles out of the greenhouse and into Neville Longbottom, who clearly arrived early for his Herbology lesson. “Hi,” she says, smiling at him. Neville, despite being in the year above, has always been kind to her, and he listens to Luna with a careful respect that instantly endears him to Ginny.

“Hi, Ginny.” He nods politely at her, then his eyes widen. “You’ve, uh, got Flitterblooms in your hair.”

“What? Oh.” She lifts a hand to her head, feeling the soft golden petals there, tucked between the sections of her braid. “Luna,” she explains, and Neville nods like he understands.

“They look good,” he says, surprising them both. Then, like he’s steeling himself for something: “Hey, Ginny …”

Demelza shrieks out loud when Ginny tells her she’s got a date to the Yule Ball (“as_ friends,” _Neville had said firmly). She insists on helping her get ready, rubbing glitter onto her lips and cheeks while Luna pins flowers into Ginny’s loose hair, violet and gardenia and lily-of-the-valley. They leave Ginny alone to pull on her dress robes— hand-me-downs from one of Ginny’s many cousins, old-fashioned white lace that makes her feel like a nymph from a poem— and for a moment as she does up the buttons she thinks she sees Tom, lurking in the corner of her vision, his voice soft in her ear: _do you think he’ll notice you now? _

_Move on, _Ginny tells herself firmly, and opens the door to let her friends back in.

Neville’s eyes pop a little bit when he sees her, which is gratifying. So is watching Harry and Ron sulk in the corner while Ginny spins around the candle-lit room, taking it in turns to dance with Neville and Seamus and a boy from Durmstrang and a girl from Beauxbatons, who blushes prettily when Ginny asks her but then twirls her around and around the dance floor until they’re both breathless and laughing. She’s taking a break to rest her aching feet when a boy drops into the seat next to her, holding out a sweating bottle of butterbeer. “You look like you could use one of these.”

Ginny eyes him— a tall, dark Ravenclaw in her brother’s year. Michael something, she thinks. The bottle is full and unopened so she takes it, grateful for the cool drink. In between sips Michael something introduces himself as Michael Corner and starts up a conversation about the music. He’s nice, attentive, witty in the way Ravenclaws tend to be. He laughs at all of her jokes, too, and whenever he does a warm pleased feeling glows in Ginny’s chest.

They talk through the next song, and the next, and then dance another two, and before she knows it the band is winding down and Michael is suggesting a walk through the rose gardens. Ginny looks up at him— his kind, dark eyes, the straight line of his jaw— and feels an old fear run through her. The last dark-haired boy with pretty words had crept softly into her life and bled her from the inside out.

_Move on, move on, move on. _Three years spent pulling herself back together, building a spine from Demelza’s bright laughter and Luna’s kind hands and her own beating heart. Tom had robbed her of body and breath and a year of her life. He would not get her future, too.

She smiles at Michael and leads him outside, into the soft dusk and roses.

***

Against all odds, Harry makes it through the first task, and the second. By the time he goes into the maze, a year’s worth of upper-level Defense lessons drilled into his head, Ginny’s certain enough that he’ll make it that she forgets to worry.

_Constant vigilance, _as Moody would have reminded her. Harry stumbles out of the maze bleeding, shaking, Cedric’s body too limp in his arms, and the world shatters.

***

Voldemort is back. _Tom _is back. Harry doesn’t give any details about what happened, not to her. He’s barely spoken to anyone since he staggered out of the maze, eyes unfocused like he’d seen a ghost. Ginny doesn’t press, but she does wonder. _Did he look like Tom, _she wants to ask Harry. _Was his voice the same? _She imagines the handsome sixteen-year-old in her memories throwing curses at Harry, making Cedric crumple to the ground, and it makes her stomach twist.

But Harry is quiet and distracted, guilt hanging heavy on his shoulders, and the train ride home passes in silence.

***

Grimmauld Place is unbearably hot. Percy leaves, and her father frowns, and Molly sets them all to cleaning duty. Ginny scrubs and organizes and eavesdrops and keeps up a quiet correspondence with Michael. She steals the _Prophet _from the kitchen counter every morning and reads it cover to cover, looking for the truth lurking behind bland rows of newsprint.

The only real delight of that summer is Tonks: Tonks has a) candy-blue hair and b) three piercings in her right ear and c) once dated a member of the_ Holyhead Harpies_, and besides these excellent virtues is an Auror with all sorts of useful information up her sleeve.

(“So to cast the most common contraceptive charm,” Tonks tells her and Hermione, lounging with her boots up in Sirius’ mum’s favorite armchair, “you just hold your wand like so, see, and say the incantation I showed you— it’s _very _important to stress the last syllable.”

“What happens if you say it wrong?” Hermione asks, her cheeks pink.

“Nothing serious,” Tonks says cheerfully, “Only he’ll be missing a rather important bit of equipment for the act. But if that’s your goal, ladies, I have better charms for that.” )

Harry arrives at Grimmauld Place with all the force and fury of a thunderstorm breaking. Molly frets and Snape curls his lip; Ginny listens to the house reverberate with Harry’s frustration and remembers the summer after her first year, how she’d drawn into herself and took to the sky. Ginny hadn’t learned to shout, then, not yet. She will not begrudge Harry his anger now.

***

School brings Umbridge, and with her the D.A._ Dumbledore’s Army_, Ginny suggests, never mind that they’re just schoolkids learning to disarm. Words have power. If you tell a lie long enough, it takes on the truth.

(Tom appears in her dreams with alarming frequency, smiling at her before he reaches out and drags her down, down onto cold stone floor. Sometimes right before he grabs her he turns into Michael, and sometimes Harry, and on the longest, worst nights she turns into him.)

Umbridge gloats. Malfoy sneers. Harry and Fred and George get suspended from Quidditch. There’s a notice pinned on the Gryffindor bulletin board the next day, asking for replacement players, and Ginny wraps her fingers tight around Demelza’s borrowed broom and writes her name down.

Angelina throws tennis balls to Ginny, and then golf balls, and then finally a real, glittering practice Snitch; when Ginny drops from the sky with the last one, tired and flushed with sweat, Angelina smiles triumphantly. “You should have tried out sooner, Weasley.”

Demelza cheers and hugs her when she finds Ginny’s made the Quidditch team. Luna promises that she’ll start knitting a lion hat. People who Ginny’s never even talked to stop her in the hallways, congratulate her, tell her they’ll be looking out for her at the next match.

In fact, the only person who seems less than chuffed is Michael; he corners her the next day, after the announcement is put out, and says rather gruffly, “You didn’t tell me you’d made the Gryffindor team.”

“Oh,” Ginny says, smiling despite herself at the reminder of her name— _her _name, pinned to the notice board. _Ginny Weasley, Gryffindor Seeker_. “Well— I made the team!”

Michael doesn’t smile, his face flushed with some emotion she can’t understand, and her heart sinks. “Michael, is there something wrong?”

“You didn’t even ask what I thought,” he grits out. “Before saying yes.”

Ginny frowns, confused. “I told you I was trying out for Seeker ages ago.”

“Well, yes, but I didn’t think you’d—”

_Make it. _It stings, hearing it from him. Ginny shuts her eyes tightly against the wave of nausea and disappointment that washes over her. Michael seems to realize his misstep quickly, and there’s genuine regret in his voice when he says, “Ginny, no it’s not like that. I knew you could get it, I just … I like you, Ginny, so much. That’s why it’s weird for me, knowing that you’ll be playing against my own house.” He reaches for her hand, and for a moment Ginny considers jerking it away, shouting that she understands perfectly, that he should be happy for her, not worried about his stupid House.

Only— the Great Hall is crowded, full of students coming down for dinner, and there’s something in Michael’s pleading gaze that tugs at her chest. Maybe he had a point. She’d feel conflicted too, wouldn’t she, if he was playing on a team against her brothers and Harry? Michael hadn’t meant to insult her, Ginny knew for sure.

“I know,” she says, her smile a bit shaky. “Long day. Sorry.”

They spend the rest of dinner talking about lighter, easier things. Michael is attentive, playing with Ginny’s hair and laughing at her jokes, and Ginny tries not to think too much about the quiet discomfort settling in her chest.

***

“Your father’s been hurt,” is what Professor McGonagall tells her, and then, “come quickly.”

Later, Ginny almost doesn’t remember it: pulling on her dressing gown, racing down the hallways after McGonagall and Fred and George, all of them crowding into the Floo into Dumbledore’s office and spinning through to Grimmauld Place. The ice-cold fear that coursed steadily through her veins as she’d stared into Sirius’ fire, thinking of her father, the last time she’d seen him, how tired he’d looked, the fear on Harry’s face when he’d described what he’d seen in the Ministry, _he’s clearly being possessed by Voldemort—_.

“I forgot,” Harry says, days later, and Ginny can barely speak through her fury. She had been eleven years old, and she had almost died, and Harry— Harry had _been there, _shaking her awake, destroying the diary. She thinks back to the summer, Harry raging through Grimmauld Place, his anger shaking the walls. Ginny had not known how to shout, at eleven, but she had taught herself. She had been forgotten once, and she would not let it happen again.

“Lucky you,” Ginny tells him, her voice dripping venom. She watches with a surge of fierce satisfaction as surprise and regret and guilt flicker across Harry’s face, his downcast eyes jerking up to her face like he’s registering her presence there for the first time.

“I’m sorry,” Harry says, and he sounds genuinely contrite. “So … do you think I’m being possessed, then?” 

(Four years of Tom sprawling lazily on her bed, brushing past her in the hallways, watching her sleep. Ginny had been living with ghosts, all this time, and no-one had ever had asked her _what was it like_.)

Ginny lets the anger swirl in her stomach, and takes a deep breath, and tells him.

***

At school, Ginny reads Harry’s interview in the _Quibbler, _his fifteen-year-old voice bleeding through the lines of Rita Skeeter’s quill, naming Death Eaters with unflinching steadiness. _Dolohov, Avery, Mulciber, Malfoy. _She watches closely as Umbridge stalks the halls in a terrific rage, as the Room of Requirement swells with new members, as people catch her arm in the hallways: Ginny did you hear, did you see, isn’t your brother friends with him, what do you think.

Words have power: they can shift, change, transform. Ginny had learned that lesson first-hand, signing away her life in shining ink. She learns it again now, crafting clever hexes and dirty jokes, roping a few more people into the D.A. meetings, hearing Harry’s words echo quietly in the hallways. In the girls’ bathroom, Marietta cries and dabs foundation over the scars spelling SNEAK. Ginny watches her with both pity and disdain. Marietta had made a promise, and then she had broken it. You had to be careful about where you wrote your name.

***

The whole school turns out for their final Quidditch match against Ravenclaw. It’s a lucky sort of day – sunlight and blue sky, the Quaffle bouncing easily from Ron’s sure hand to Alicia to Katie, ten-oh to Gryffindor, _Weasley is our king _ringing off the bleachers. Ginny circles high above the crowd, keeping her eyes relaxed like Angelina had taught her while chasing down golf balls. Below her, the score creeps higher and higher: fifty-thirty, eighty-sixty, one hundred and twenty to ninety, Gryffindor’s lead widening in leaps and bounds.

Gryffindor clinches a hundred-sixty-point advantage, and right then is when Ginny spots a flash of gold near Ron’s ankle. It’s closer to Ginny, on the Gryffindor side of the pitch, but she can tell from the shift in Cho’s posture that she’s seen it too, and Cho’s broom is faster than Ginny’s old Cleansweep. Ginny only hesitates a second before pointing her broom up, _away _from where Cho’s already darting towards the Snitch— climbing at an angle for one, two, three seconds until she’s nearly fifty feet above Cho, and then Ginny _dives, _plunging like a arrow straight for the glint of gold near the ground before her.

There’s a moment when Cho looks up, her eyes widening, and Ginny’s certain they’re both going to crash into each other. But then Cho skirts to the side by a broom-length, and Ginny stretches out a grasping, desperate hand and feels her fingers close around cool metal. She pulls out of the dive a split-second before hitting the ground, her fist clenched high, the Gryffindor crowd bursting into a great roar of jubilation, her heart singing in her chest.

It takes Michael a while to make his way to her after the match, fighting his way through a tight knot of whooping, unruly Gryffindors intent on hoisting Ron onto their shoulders. Ginny’s still grinning, the win surging through her like a high, but she dims a little on seeing Michael’s rather dour expression.

“Congratulations,” he says flatly when they’re finally together, not meeting her eyes.

“Thanks,” Ginny says, beaming. “Did you see the end? I thought I was going to become a permanent Quidditch pitch decoration, honestly— _here lies Ginny Weasley, may her memory be a warning _ —”

“I saw it.” Michael’s voice is clipped. “Congrats on getting the Snitch from Cho. I hope it was fun, losing us the points.”

Ginny stares at him, caught off guard. “What are you talking about?”

“The _score._” Michael steps closer to her, pushing into her space. “You were a hundred sixty points up when Cho saw the Snitch, Ginny! She could have caught it, and Gryffindor would have won anyway. You didn’t have to— to snatch it out from under her nose like that.”

They’re drawing a small crowd now. Ginny ignores them, staring at Michael’s glowering face, her chest a tight knot of guilt and anger and frustration. In her hands the Snitch flutters feebly, the metal warm against her fingers, and Ginny thinks about green-and-gold fireworks, the rusty lock on the Burrow’s broomshed, the first time she’d felt a broom vibrate against her fingers, promising her magic and flight. Everything she’d done to get to this point, and opposite her Michael, asking her to apologize.

“Of course I had to,” Ginny says, and turns to shoulder her way through the crowd.

(She will not be the girl in the fairytale, searching for redemption in a beast, dying with her heart in an arrogant boy’s hands. No-one will steal her from herself, not again.)

***

Luna comes over nearly every day at the beginning of the summer before fifth year, her father having left the country on a dragon-watching trip in the Hebrides. She and Ginny wander through the dirt roads surrounding the Burrow, their skin tanning (Luna) and freckling (Ginny), spending their afternoons swimming or reading or sleeping by the pond behind the Burrow, Ginny watching the sunlight dance across the water and bleach Luna’s hair golden.

One afternoon they wander far enough that they end up at Ottery St. Catchpole, the little Wizarding hamlet near Luna’s house. There’s a dusty old secondhand shop there, full of bizarrely ornamented floppy hats and feathered boas that look straight out of Great-Aunt Muriel’s closet. Ginny floats out of the dressing room in a velvety, slinky dark-green dress and tosses her hair over her shoulder at Luna, grinning.

“You look very nice,” Luna tells her. “Though I think it would be better with the hat.”

Ginny goes to the register to pay for the velvet dress when a dark, glossy band of books on a leaning shelf catches her eye. She takes a step towards it: small notebooks, a whole row of them, shining black against the warm oak grain. At the end there are a few different colours - deep blue and pale pink and one a dark, rich green, the same shade as the dress in her arms.

She opens it. The pages are cream-colored and blank. Ginny flips through them, watching the paper blur beneath her fingers, and waits for the inevitable dread, the old wash of regret and fear and panic, but it never comes. Maybe this notebook is different. Or maybe it’s not the notebook.

The velvet dress gets hung up in her closet, well out of her mother’s eyes; the book goes in her bedside nightstand, kept safe like a promise.

***

There is— always has been— a part of Ginny that’s aware when Harry’s in a room. She forgets, sometimes, her promise to stamp it out. She catches his eye or looks for his face in a crowd and feels a bit guilty, later, like she’s been careless with her heart.

That winter, Harry starts looking back.

There’s something different, now, a new intensity in his gaze. Like he’s seeing her properly for the first time. It should thrill her, but there’s a part of Ginny that feels unease flare up when he focuses on her, like someone’s struck up a match and lit her from the inside out.

(There was a time when Harry was in her storybooks, too, the gold-inked hero, Ginny’s knight in mud-spattered Gryffindor robes. She’s not sure when he fell out and turned into a real boy, Harry-just-Harry, who sleeps with his mouth open and teases her during Quidditch practice and catches her eye in the hallways like a friend.)

So Ginny does what she knows best, and shores up her defenses. She keeps it light, makes easy jokes, lets Dean Thomas wrap his warm hands around her waist and help her through the portrait hole. She goes on long, freezing flights with Demelza and spends spare hours in the greenhouses with Luna and Neville, watching the sunlight filter through the thick glass and break over Luna’s smile.

_Who do you see?_she wonders privately, watching Harry watch her. The lovestruck schoolgirl, the crying girl in the Chamber, the brighter, sharper thing she’d turned herself into to put all of it behind her. She thinks of snakeskins, those pale imitations of selves. _Who do you think I am?_

***

Harry drops into the chair next to her without speaking a single word, tension bleeding through the set of his shoulders. Across from Ginny, Ron and Hermione glance uneasily at one another. They’ve already heard the story. Everyone has – Moaning Myrtle has been screaming bloody murder from her bathroom all night, and no one has seen Harry or Malfoy in hours.

“What happened?” Ginny asks quietly. Harry tells them everything, his voice clipped and stressed, eyes darting rapidly. When he talks about the fight, the attempted _Crucio, _something in Ginny’s stomach seizes. She wants to reach out to Harry, comfort him, touch his arm and make sure he’s unharmed. She wants to hurt Malfoy _herself, _and there’s something terrifying about the intensity of this anger, the sudden protectiveness curling in her gut.

“ —got a reputation for Potions brilliance you don’t deserve,” Hermione scoffs, and something in Ginny shoves and breaks at the sight of Harry’s torn expression.

“Give it a rest, Hermione!” she snaps. It’s the first time all night Harry’s looked at her and something about his gaze bolsters her. “By the sound of it, Malfoy was trying to use an Unforgivable Curse, you should be glad Harry had something good up his sleeve!”

(_Crucio, _and Moody’s spider jerking, and Harry in a graveyard, fourteen and terrified. _You allow me to hurt you, _Tom’s voice whispered in her ear. Once it had been Ginny in that bathroom, her life draining away down marble tile. What would she have given, for the chance to hurt him first?)

Harry’s face is naked with relief, and Ginny glances away quickly, heart pounding. _I think we understand each other. _Perhaps they are more similar than they think, Harry and Ginny and the ink-fingered boy between them both.

***

Later, after she’s made up with Hermione, Harry comes to find her.

“Saturday’s match,” he starts, leaning against the stone wall in front of her. “Dean will fill in for Chaser. I want you to play Seeker.”

“Okay,” Ginny says, swallowing hard, but Harry’s not done. He digs around in his pocket before holding out his hand, something gold glittering in his open palm. The Captain’s badge.

“I’m going to be in detention,” he says, steadfastly ignoring Ginny’s surprise. “I can’t captain you all from the Potions dungeon, Ginny. I want— I need you to do it.”

For a moment refusal hovers sharp on the tip of her tongue. _Harry _is their captain, their star Seeker, the youngest player in a century.Ginny isn’t even the most veteran player on the team.

But she’s practiced for this. She’s put in her time— all those hours diving after golf balls with Angelina, early-morning training sessions that left her muscles burning, even all the times she’d forced herself to tolerate Cormac fucking McLaggen for the sake of team camaraderie. She’s hung back with Harry after so many practices, she knows his playbook better than her own Charms notes.

Ginny looks at the badge again, shining bright in Harry’s open palm. There are calluses there, she knows, built up from long hours on a broom, on the other side _I must not tell lies _stark against brown skin. Ginny’s hands have their own calluses— their own scars— and somehow this steadies her. Harry’s asking her because he trusts her, and Ginny trusts herself.

She grins up at him, and takes the badge. “Watch out, Potter, or I just might decide to keep it.”

“I’d like to see you try,” Harry retorts, eyes flashing, and Ginny’s heart skips a traitorous beat in her chest. Well, then. Game on.

***

They win the match. They _win_ the fucking Quidditch Cup, four hundred and fifty to a hundred and forty, the Snitch clutched tight in Ginny’s jubilant fist. McGonagall presses the golden trophy into Ginny’s hands and gives her a real, warm smile, the crowd thundering its appreciation behind her.

Colin’s camera flashes, bright and blinding, and Ginny thinks suddenly of Harry, wishing her luck, offering her his badge. Harry, who’d seen her as the crying girl in the Chamber and Ron’s little sister and Ginny the teammate, Ginny the girlfriend. All of those skeletons buried in her closet, and every time Harry looks at her like she’s someone new and brave and brilliant, all those selves and something more. 

She thinks maybe she’s got something to tell him, after the celebration party.

(As it turns out, he has the same idea.)

***

Tom shows up at the foot of her bed that night, his outline sharp and real like it hasn’t been in years.

“Fuck off,” Ginny tells him easily, flopping back onto her pillow. Her lips still feel pleasantly warm, her hair messy from where Harry had carded his fingers through it. They’d stayed out long past curfew, tucked under the Invisibility Cloak, dissecting the match in bits and pieces.

“Harry Potter,” Tom says, the name a lit firework on his tongue. “So you got what you wanted, Ginny. Handsome, _famous _Harry Potter, wasn’t it? The second boy you ever loved.”

She feels him come around to sit by her, the bed sagging under his weight. The other boys she’d dated had a distinctive boy-smell, various degrees of laundry detergent and sweat and cold Scottish air. Tom only ever smells of ink and paper.

“He’ll never understand you." His voice is velvet-soft. “You know that. He likes you, desires you, but you’ll never make sense to him, Ginny. He’ll never understand us_,_ you and I, why you kept writing to me even when you knew it was wrong. How you _wanted _to make me real. Can you ever tell him that?”

“Leave me _alone,_” Ginny snaps, shutting her eyes tight, blocking him out. She tries to remember Harry, the way he’d reached for her, kissed her in front of the whole common room like he hadn’t seen anyone else but her. “I don’t want you here anymore.”

Tom laughs, too knowing. “Are you sure?” he murmurs, and vanishes before she can protest.

***

Two months, that’s what they get: two months of sunlit happiness, stealing kisses between classes and skipping dinner to go wading in the lake, Harry’s jeans rolled up to his knobbly knees, laughing and spluttering as Ginny splashes water in his face. Learning how their bodies fit together, hands and lips and hipbones, Harry’s fingers lacing with hers, his mouth warm on her skin.

Two months, and then lightning strikes the tower and Hogwarts crumbles apart around them, and before Ginny can blink she’s on the banks of the lake, listening to Harry tell her that all of this has to end.

Ginny has sharp eyes, and a writer’s gift for seeing stories. Harry’s destiny is written out in front of him, unfinished, and she knows where it leads. She kisses him good-bye on his birthday— one last flash of sunlight— and tries not to imagine where the road might go.

Her story isn’t the one they’ll tell, she thinks, watching Harry leave, but it’s needed just the same.

***

Weapons of war: Nosebleed Nougats, Garroting Gas, Peruvian Instant Darkness Powder.

Enemy forces: Carrows (both, but Alecto is more clever and cruel than her brother by half); Malfoy and Parkinson, Slytherin prefects; Snape, always Snape, stalking around the school with black robes billowing.

(“He’s been dressed like a Death Eater this whole time and we didn’t even realize!” Seamus grumbles over breakfast.

“Figures You-Know-Who would pick the ugliest uniform there is,” Lavender smirks as she butters her toast. There’s a bruise blossoming on her cheekbone, dark brown and mottled magenta that she wears like a badge of honor.

“Just goes to show,” Parvati says wisely, “Even pure blood can’t buy taste.”)

Ginny walks through Hogwarts’ hallowed halls like a general, a soldier, a teenage girl with everything on the line. She undercuts the Carrows’ regime with the stealth of Fred and George at their finest, burns through their wards with Hermione’s patience and diligence, tries to summon Ron’s mind for strategy and Percy’s authority and Bill’s daring, Charlie’s audaciousness.

(“The mingling of pure and Muggle blood,” Alecto Carrow spits in their Muggle Studies class, “has been shown to weaken the brain of the child … distort the appearance … dull the mind...”

“I reckon so does inbreeding,” Ginny says, blood thundering hot through her ears, “If we’re judging by you and your brother.”

Alecto’s rage is towering and terrible, but Colin Creevey catches her eye and hides a smile from behind his textbook. Words are power, even for the powerless.)

The growing crowd in the Room of Requirement looks at her with something like awe, like a savior, and Ginny thinks of Tom, on the banks of the lake, drawing in would-be Death Eaters with clever lies. Harry, standing here at fifteen, his shoulders set against the world.

(This is Ginny’s story: the girl who stayed, the last Weasley at Hogwarts, the final line of defense. This was Ginny’s war. It had been that way since she was eleven years old.)

Ginny takes a deep breath, and when she opens her mouth the words are her own.

***

The Sword is—

In truth, the Sword is nothing except a hunch and a time window and a healthy dash of Gryffindor recklessness.

Neville keeps the lookout, and Luna coerces the stone gargoyle, and it’s Ginny who eases the glass case open with spells lifted from Bill’s old textbooks. Godric’s sword is heavy in her hands, cold steel and rubies glinting in the moonlight, and as she lifts it from the wall she thinks of Arthur, pulling Excalibur from the stone— _am I worthy am I worthy please tell me I am—_

(This is what you should remember: it was Ginny who took the sword. This was her story, too: the dampness of the Chamber, the chill in her veins. A slash of silver amidst the murky water.)

For a moment, it works. Ginny lets the blade rest on Dumbledore’s dusty carpet, breathing hard, looking up to mirror Neville’s grin.

And then: the vice-grip of a defensive spell snaking around her wrists, forcing her hands apart. The sword clatters to the floor with a dull ring, her wand and Neville and Luna’s following moments after.Her feet are planted to the ground, heavy, immobile.

“Miss Weasley,” Snape says her name like an insult. “I do not believe that belongs to you.”

Behind him, she can see Luna’s pale, terrified face, like a floating moon in the darkness.

“Tell me,” Snape continues quietly, “where did you get the idea to take such a valuable item? From my own private office?”

Ginny’s heart speeds up. “Truth or dare,” she says, carefully looking at a point over Snape’s shoulder. “You know how it gets.“

“_Liar_,” Snape snarls. “Look at me. Who told you about this sword? Have you been communicating with anyone— the Order of the Phoenix, perhaps—”

Ginny wrenches her gaze away, but Snape’s too fast, stepping in front of her so he’s directly in her line of sight. Their eyes click into place, and she feels the familiar rake of a mind that’s not her own, images flashing through her head unbidden: the crowded back garden of the Burrow, all of them passing around an old Snitch, and Ron’s voice saying “pity he wouldn’t give you the sword, Harry,” .... Harry at eleven, exhausted and mud-spattered, the sword dragging on the Chamber floor … Harry in her room, drawing nearer …

_No, _Ginny thinks furiously, _stop, _and suddenly it’s Moody’s voice, forcing itself into her head instead of Harry’s: _concentration, willpower, unwillingness to bow to authority. _

“I said _stop!”_It comes out as a shout.

To her surprise, Snape takes a step back, the creeping feeling in Ginny’s head easing immediately. For a moment there’s silence, punctuated only by Neville and Luna’s shallow breathing. Then he looks away, breaking eye contact, and Ginny’s wrists spring apart, the invisible bonds holding them gone.

“Detention,” he says brusquely. “In the Forbidden Forest, all of you. Hagrid will supervise.”

Ginny stares at him. Her feet are lighter, the spell holding them in place lifted. Still, she doesn’t move.

“Must I repeat myself?” Snape spits. “Out, _now_, before you’re expelled or worse.”

***

“I don’t get it,” Neville repeats later, his brow furrowed. “Detention with Hagrid? That’s almost nothing. And we _broke into his office._”

“Perhaps he’s distracted,” Luna offers, but even she sounds uncertain. They’re the last ones in the Gryffindor common room, the fire burning low, casting all their faces in gold.

“Ginny?” Neville says. “What do you think?”

Ginny doesn’t say anything: she’s staring at the armchair by the fire, left empty. She’d sat there with Harry, last year, and they’d laughed about Romilda Vane and the tattoo on his chest, Harry’s glasses reflecting the firelight, his hand warm on her lower back.

Maybe Snape had seen that memory, too. Maybe he’d seen all of them. She’d let him in, just as she’d let in Tom, never strong enough to say no, never strong enough to keep him out. Swayed, as always, by her thoughts of Harry.

“Ginny?” Luna says cautiously, craning her head to look at her. 

“Snape knows too much.” Ginny’s voice is hoarse. She feels like she’s eleven again, whispering to the basilisk, strangling chickens, blood on her hands. “He knew about— about Harry being at the Burrow over the summer— it’s my fault, he saw my memories— I don’t know what else he could have found out—”

She’s rambling, she knows, can feel Neville and Luna exchanging heavy glances behind her back, but there’s an old fear settling into her bones, drumming in her chest. _My fault, my fault, my fault. _

“You can’t say that,” Neville says quickly. “He had you on the spot, didn’t he? And you did do something, we saw it. ”

“So _what_,” Ginny snaps, her temper rising. She leaps to her feet, pacing back and forth, nerves crackling under her skin. She doesn’t let herself look at Neville and Luna, can’t bear to see blame there, or worse, pity. “So I told him to stop— it wasn’t enough, was it?”

“It was plenty,” Neville says, his voice firm. “Ginny, _look at us._”

Ginny, reluctantly, turns her head. Her friends are watching her closely, concern written all over their faces, and she pushes down a spike of irritation – she’s not the one they need to look out for. 

“You’re not responsible,” Luna says finally, carefully, “For protecting yourself against everyone who wants to hurt you.”

“Of _course_ I am,” Ginny says, her voice flat. “I have to be. We’re at war – we’re responsible for each other.” She thinks of the D.A., the weight of all those young hopeful faces on her shoulders. This is her war, her army, that room full of kids who believe her when she speaks. She has to be brave, be untouchable, because next time it won’t be Snape. It’ll be the Carrows, it’ll be Bellatrix, it’ll be Tom.

“And the kids in the D.A.?” Neville asks quietly, watching her closely. “Do they have to protect themselves, too?”

That stings. “No.” Her voice is hoarse. “No. They’re just children.”

“You were a child, too.” Luna says gently.

Ginny freezes. She knows what Luna’s referring to – but she’s never really talked about the diary with anyone, not Luna, not Demelza, not even Harry. That girl was gone, buried under piles of rock and Chamber floor, and no-one had noticed her leave. Ginny can’t bring her back, not now, not when she needs bravery the most.

"Not anymore," she says, voice shaking a bit. Her whole body is screaming at her to leave, deflect, grab a broom and disappear, so she stands up quickly, before Luna can say anything. "I'm going to bed." 

Neville looks up at her, startled, concern creasing his brow. “Ginny —”

“_Please_,” she says. 

Luna pats Neville’s arm, and he relents, sagging back onto the sofa.

“We’ll be here tomorrow,” she tells Ginny, her voice soft. “Neville will walk me back to Ravenclaw tower.” A pause. “Don’t be so hard on yourself, Ginny.”

She lingers in the common room for a long time, watching the fire burn down to ash. 

***

That night, Ginny lies in her four-poster bed, swathed in Gryffindor red-and-gold, and lets herself think about what Luna said. Once upon a time Ginny had been terrified, trusting, defenseless, and she had spent every day after building herself into someone different.

(Here is the truth of it: you can be nobody and still be brave. You can be terrified and still be brave. You can lose, you can turn tail, you can bring all the troubles of the world down upon yourself, you can be the snake and the poison apple both. Still there is room for courage to live in your chest. That was Godric’s inheritance and his promise.)

_I was a child, _Ginny thinks, desperately, and for the first time she can feel something raw and painful breaking through the cracks in her armor, washing over her like an ocean wave, like grief. _I was eleven years old. I wanted a friend. _

(_You allow me to hurt you,_ Tom had told her, but she had never deserved to be hurt.)

Ginny draws the heavy scarlet hangings, buries her face in her hands, and cries herself to sleep.

***

In the end, it goes like this: Fred, crumpled in the hallway, still smiling. Tonks, colourless and still in a way she’d never been in life. Harry, dead and risen again, circling Voldemort in the Great Hall and talking about love.

Ginny stands over Voldemort’s body and looks at him properly for the first time in her life. There are children, she knows, who will have nightmares about this man —the grotesquely pale face, slitted red eyes, cruelty written in the sharp line of his mouth. Ginny's fears run older and quieter. The danger in Tom was his laughter, his kindness, the curve of his smile. This body in front of her is a stranger, as she would have been to him. 

The smoke is clearing, the dust settling. Ginny turns her back on Tom Riddle, and goes home. 

***

“There were seven Horcruxes,” Harry tells her. They’re sat at the kitchen table of the Burrow, sunlight streaming in through the windows. A thousand years ago they’d been planning a wedding here. “Hufflepuff’s cup, Ravenclaw’s diadem, Slytherin’s locket. The snake.” Harry spreads his fingers, studying his hands, then looks up to meet her eyes. “And Riddle’s diary.”

It’s almost nothing. Ginny’s always known, deep in her bones, that there was something beyond normal Dark magic in the diary’s dark, leeching pull. But there’s a calm that comes with knowing she _wasn’t _crazy – she hadn’t been imagining it, a silly stupid girl fooled by a book. It feels better than expected, to put a name to all this grief.

Then it hits her. _Seven _Horcruxes, Harry had said, and named six of them. Now he sprawls across from her, real and alive, and Ginny thinks of his limp body in Hagrid’s arms, spectacles askew.

“And you,” she says. Harry nods, rubbing his scar absentmindedly. Ginny doubts he even notices he’s doing it. She watches him and something echoes in her, a faint recognition.

(What does it do to you, when you live with another soul for that long? One boy had walked into that forest, and another had walked out. Who is this stranger in the mirror, returned to himself?)

_If you want to talk about it, _she almost offers, but she doesn’t feel ready to talk about it either.

“I felt the same,” she says instead, years from the girl who’d snapped at him in Grimmauld Place. _Lucky you. _“I _feel _the same.”

She wants to say more. That she woke up every day after the Chamber feeling empty and hollow, like there was a cavern in the space behind her ribcage. That on good days she can fill it up a little with the rush of a goal scored, the wind in her hair, a joke well-landed. That on bad days she misses it, that soothing emptiness, the quiet thrill of being entirely known.

Ginny doesn’t tell him this, but she thinks someday she might.

***

McGonagall recruits every volunteer she can think of for the rebuilding of Hogwarts. Ginny joins with them, standing in a crowd among piles of stone and rubble, watching sunlight filter through the exposed wooden beams.

“The school is badly damaged,” McGonagall tells them, her lined face creasing. “Unfortunately, the Founders did not document the original spellwork used to construct the foundations. We will have to go off what we can in the library, and use our modern spellwork from there.”

“We should record it, then.” Ginny blurts out, surprising herself. McGonagall glances at her, and she steadies her shoulders, feeling the warm weight of eyes on her back. “If this ever happens again. To remember.”

McGonagall eyes her, then nods briskly. “An excellent idea, Miss Weasley,” she says, in a tone that almost implies _ten points to Gryffindor _with it.“The areas that require immediate work are the following …”

Ginny joins Luna and Neville in helping repair the shattered greenhouses, Neville repotting plants while Luna melds together fractured glass with careful, sweeping traces of her wand. Ginny, for her part, pulls up weeds and writes it all down in her little green notebook: the spells they used, how the plants are growing, copies of the construction plans that Dean had so carefully drawn for them. With every word written the quill feels lighter in her hand.

_***_

The pipes in the second-floor girl’s bathroom need fixing, and no-one blinks when Ginny volunteers, broomstick in hand. 

Her hands only shake slightly when she opens the door. Most of the ceiling is caved in, rubble and rock littering the basins, mirrors shattered. There’s no sign or sound of Myrtle, and Ginny wonders if she’s finally managed to escape this place for more hygienic haunts. Lucky her.

The sink sputters uselessly when she tries to turn it on, but the little gold snake is still there, glinting brightly on the handle of the faucet. Ginny takes a deep breath, and lets out a strangled hiss. 

She slides down easily, but inside the tunnel is smaller than she remembers – she has to hunch as she makes her way past smooth rock, goosebumps prickling on the back of her neck. Ginny breathes in, out, and grips her broom tightly as she makes her way past half-remembered landmarks – the pile of rocks Ron had shifted aside all those years ago, the spot where she’d stumbled and fell on the rough stone. Her knee stings briefly, a phantom ache.

She can feel the Chamber as soon as she steps into it – the air is cooler here, the claustrophobia of the tunnel fallen away amidst the high, arching ceilings, the rows and rows of columns stretching into darkness. Curved lifelessly around one of them is the hulking, eerie skeleton of the basilisk, its white ribs gleaming like teeth, spine twisted and lifeless.

“_Lumos maxima_,” Ginny says firmly, and light flares into the room, sending the shadows scurrying towards the corners. Now she can see the details she’d forgotten – the glinting emerald eyes of the carved serpents, the pattern of black-and-white tiles she’d collapsed onto, her cheek pressed to the cold floor.

She’s shivering, Ginny realizes. It feels like the moment is happening to someone else— another Ginny Weasley, standing in her place, walking towards the center of the Chamber with purposeful strides. This is where she had woken up, all those years ago, her hands dark with ink. She looks down, half-expecting to see her shoes dripping wet.

But the stone is clean, her feet dry, only a few loose basilisk fangs scattered on the floor like giant pearls. There is no indication that she had ever been here, no sign of Fawkes or Harry. No sign of Tom.

Ginny lets out a breath. She doesn’t know what she had expected. Evidence, maybe— a mark, a scar, something of hers left behind. More than just an empty room and old bones. She hesitates for a long moment before picking up one of the loose fangs, tucking it safely into her bag before grabbing her broomstick.

There is nothing to be found here, not anymore.

***

They etch a memorial into the south wall of Hogwarts, overlooking the Great Lake, shadowing the white marble where Dumbledore’s body lay. Hundreds of shining names, pressed into the wall: all the casualties of the Second Wizarding War, house-elves and Muggles and wizards alike. _In memoriam_, Kingsley says grandly, the cameras popping like fireworks.

Ginny stands hand-in-hand with George after the memorial service, her fingertips white against _Fred Weasley, _thinking of the smiling boy who had promised her a toilet seat. _To remember._

***

That night it’s finally Tom in her room at the Burrow, on the end of her bed, legs crossed. He had looked impossibly older to her, at eleven; at sixteen he just looks like a boy.

“So you went looking for me.” His smile shows teeth.

Ginny doesn’t smile back. “I don’t need to look,” she says calmly. “I know where you are.”

“And where is that?”

Ginny thinks of the punctured diary, Voldemort’s shriveled corpse, Harry lying limp in Hagrid’s arms. The Chamber, empty. Her notebook filled with words. “Dead.”

Tom rolls his eyes, a petulant teenager. “I thought we’d been over this. I’m a part of you now, Ginny. You can’t kill me.”

“Still don’t get it, do you?” Ginny says, narrowing her eyes. “You’re not a part of me. You never had me. You never did, not when I was eleven, not now.”

Tom slides off the bed, stalking towards her so he’s next to her pillow. In the lamplight she can see where he’s faded at the edges. “Of course I am,” he says, and he looks irate now, handsome features dark with anger. “I always will be. I _loved _you, Ginny, when no one else did —”

Ginny thinks of Luna’s gold-linked paintings, her mother screaming down Bellatrix in the Great Hall, the tiny names now etched forever into Hogwarts’ stone walls. Fred grinning at her with fireworks bursting in the background. _Anything’s possible if you’ve got enough nerve. _

“This was never love,” she says, and reaches under her pillow for the basilisk fang.

Tom goes easily, his shade flickering out of Ginny’s life as quickly and quietly as he had slipped in years ago. She wakes up to sunlight and clean sheets, devoid of ink or the dark, tarry substance Hermione had described coming out of the Horcruxes. The curving white fang is still tucked in her drawer, exactly where she’d left it the night before.

(Remember, again, the part about beginnings.)

***

Harry finds her in the orchard, looping slow lazy circles through the trees on her broom. He sprawls on the grass and watches her, the sunlight glinting gold off his glasses.

After a while Ginny finally lands and makes her way over to him.

“Hi,” Harry says. “Your mum’s looking for you. Something about N.E.W.T. registration.”

“So you came out here to find me?”

“Are you kidding?” Harry grins. “I came out here to hide too.”

Ginny laughs, her chest warming, and drops down on the ground next to Harry, the dry summer grass pricking her bare legs. For a few moments they lie there in silence, watching the clouds drift slowly above them, backs warming on the ground.

Harry hadn’t pressed her when she had asked about opening the Chamber, just shown her how to do the strangled hiss and advised her to ask Ron for help. Maybe he had suspected, or guessed. Maybe he was just trusting her with what he had to give. 

_Who do you see? Who do you_ want_ to see? _All those girls, those carefully constructed skins, those selves Ginny had lost and found again; Harry looks at her like she’s all of it and something more, a quantity unknown but worth discovering. He doesn’t know all of her, but he would ask the right questions if she let him.

She rolls over, facing Harry, close enough that she can feel his arm pressing warm against hers. Their eyes meet, uncertainty hovering there. _Are you sure?_

“Ask me a question,” she promises, and Harry smiles.

***

Ginny doesn’t go back to Hogwarts.

All summer she’s attended league tryouts between funerals, and now she has holes in her best black shoes and a fan of shining offer letters— Ballycastle, Appleby, Falmouth, Holyhead. The future beckons, golden and glittering, and Ginny has always chased down what she wants.

Besides. Deep down Ginny knows that she’s done with Hogwarts, that whatever lessons the old castle had to teach her were buried with Fred’s body and forest soil and the Chamber floor. Let Harry and Ron join the Aurors, Hermione blaze through the Ministry, Luna go abroad chasing wonders. Ginny wants this: a screaming crowd, the Quaffle in her hands, the world at her feet. Learning what her body can do when she’s in control of it, the miracles of muscle and sinew and bone.

This is her life, now: a tiny flat in Holyhead, waking up with Harry tangled in her sheets, both of them flicking toothpaste at each other in the cramped bathroom before work. Helping George out in the shop, offering advice and jokes and a steady stream of sarcasm, setting off fireworks in the back room when he’s not looking. Letters from Luna, postmarked from all over the world; Ginny keeps a map, stuck with pins for every letter, and watches it fill up.

This, and this: game day, the crowd roaring, the world exploding into Harpies green-and-gold. Fans running up to her in the streets, little girls clutching her _Which Broomstick? _cover in their hands, boys with jerseys saying _Weasley _and then _Potter _on the back.

Harry clips out all the Harpies-related stories in the _Prophet _and pins them up on the wall. When he’s done Ginny kisses him, slow and warm and steady, like they have all the time in the world. It feels like maybe they do.

***

The green notebook fills up, slowly, the pages growing heavy from Quidditch plays and copies of Molly’s knitting patterns and Teddy’s blocky, childish hand learning to trace letters and shapes.

George comes over (“to stick my nose in your business,” he says, “someone should”) and peers at it, flipping past where Ron had scribbled down his chicken pie recipe to the unmarked pages. The notebook disappears for a few days and returns with a picture tucked in it: Fred and George and Ginny at the World Cup, boasting three matching grins, cheeks smeared with green and red and gold paint.

Ginny lets herself cry about it for twenty minutes and then pastes the picture in carefully, casting a Preserving Charm on it. It feels good, putting down something real.

***

Names are magic. Names have power. Ginny, daughter of Arthur, knows this better than most. _Ginevra_, from the Italian for old queen Guinevere, who had wanted who she shouldn't, and brought a whole kingdom to ruin for her crimes.

When the time comes, Ginny calls her first son James and her second son Al. She names her daughter _Lily, _after the grandmother she wouldn’t meet, and _Luna _for the godmother she’d always have. She keeps the map, stuck with pins, a record of every place Luna has ever been. One day, when Lily’s older, she’ll show it to her. _Look, _Ginny will say to her daughter, _look at all the places you can go. _

***

When Lily turns two, Ginny leaves the kids in her mother’s and Harry’s capable hands and goes back to Quidditch. The World Cup is two years away, and she hasn’t quite given up on the thirteen-year-old girl who’d watched, wide-mouthed, from the stands and thought, _I want this. _

It’s hard and rewarding, training with Gwenog again, relearning the way her body strains and stretches and moves. She relishes in the physicality of it, delights in the feeling of coming back exhausted and sore to sit down to dinner with Harry and hear about James’ day at school. She loves seeing them in the family box at Harpies games, Al wrapped up in a green-and-gold scarf, Lily held tight in Harry’s arms, all of them beaming at her and cheering.

The All-England Quidditch League starts its scouting for the World Cup. There’s no such thing as a guaranteed spot, not on the international level, but Ginny’s confident that she’ll have her shot. She’s been doing this for a long time; she’s got a collection of glittering awards on the mantel and she trusts her own ability. All she needs, right now, is a chance.

The letter never comes.

***

“You have got to be _joking._”

Anger, dark and bitter like coffee grounds on her tongue. Ginny narrows her eyes and allows it to brew.

“I’m afraid not.” The England Quidditch Authority Superintendent is a tall, thin man. His blue eyes glint impassively at her as he leans back in his chair, elbows on the heavy oak desk between them. “As we mentioned in our correspondence, the English team reserves the right to select players for preliminaries as we see fit. Your extended leave— “

“As you see fit?” Ginny says, her irritation spiking. “With all due respect, Superintendent, there are players with significantly less experience and lower statistics than me on that list. I don’t see how it’s a benefit to anyone to keep me from at least _trying out.“_

“Mrs. Potter.” His voice is delicate and measured. Ginny wants to hex him so, so, badly. “You’ve taken three years off in the last six years. I’m sure you understand what a liability it could be for the team … for the_ country_ …. if you, ah, took another leave.”

“Yes, to have my _children,_” Ginny says, and then it hits her. “Are you telling me— that’s what this is about? You’re too worried I might have a _baby_ to let me even try out?”

“Of course not,” he says silkily, and lets the lie hang heavy between them.

“I can’t believe this,” she growls, heart pounding in her chest. She pushes back her chair with a loud scrape, automatically gathering her things. When she reaches the door she turns back to see the Superintendent watching her calmly, looking utterly unfazed.

“You’re going to regret this,” she spits out, slamming the door, and resolves to make it true.

***

Harry casts _Muffliato _on the kitchen and lets her rage, furious, slamming cupboards and overturning mugs, emitting a steady stream of curses that would have made Fred proud.

“God, they’re all such fucking _pricks._”Ginny says finally, collapsing into a chair and pinching her nose. She feels exhausted, deflated. “It’s just not_ fair_.”

She can sense Harry drop into the chair beside her, his hand reaching out to rub steady, soothing circles into her back. Something about the physical contact makes her eyes prickle, a lump rising in her throat.

“Whatever you want to do, Gin,” Harry murmurs, and she can hear the unspoken promise in his words. For better or for worse.

She’s silent for a long moment. “Suppose I want to let a Niffler into his office.”

Harry snorts quietly. “I’m sure the Auror department would look the other way.”

“Suppose I want to turn their corridor into a swamp.”

“I’ll owl George.”

Ginny laughs wetly, wiping at her eyes and blinking them open. Their kitchen is a bit of a mess — she hasn’t performed any accidental magic since she was pregnant with James, but now her coffee mug is tipped on the floor, blotting out parts of the headline. _WIZ GAM T CONVE S FOR 833RD SES N. _

She looks at it, and she can’t look away. “Suppose I do something else.”

Harry follows her gaze to the coffee stain, the rows of newsprint. He raises one dark eyebrow.

“Careful, Weasley,” he tells her, though they both know she rarely is. Ginny grins, and goes for her quill.

***

Here is another beginning: the woman, the notebook, the quill dipped in ink.

Ginny reaches out to people: other retired players, women who’d had children and found themselves suddenly shut out of games and sponsorships and contracts. Players who’d refused the come-ons of someone powerful and found themselves suddenly off the roster.

(Women talk, is the thing. That’s the joke, right? _Women, they never stop blabbing. _Ginny was a chatterbox, too popular for her own good. She knew the power of conversations held in bathroom stalls and changing rooms, quiet confidences and whispered warnings. _Watch out for him. Don’t go alone. Make sure you have a good lawyer._)

She listens, and asks the right questions, and writes everything down.

***

Six months later, it’s on the front page of the _Prophet’s _sports section. Harry flips open the paper over the kitchen table, beaming with pride, the way he’d once read out Harpies scores over breakfast.

“_Professional Quidditch Is Failing Its Female Players,_” he reads carefully. “Byline —” he grins at her. “Ginny Potter, _Prophet _contributor.”

(Ginny personally owls a copy to the England Quidditch League Superintendent. With flowers.)

***

The World Cup jersey with POTTER on the back gets framed on the wall, next to Harry’s Chocolate Frog Card and the newspaper blurb announcing the pick of Ginny Weasley, 17, as a reserve Chaser for the Holyhead Harpies.

***

Words have power. Words are magic. Ginny knows this better than most.

She uses her own the best she can, writing for the people who don’t have anyone to listen. She builds a career out of it— covering matches and championships, yes, but also the people behind the game: Beaters who’ve suffered brain damage from the relentless bludgers to their skull, female coaches always passed up for promotions, even the Veela mascots of the Bulgarian team, who’d sang and danced until their feet bled for barely any pay.

Ginny storms and swans and schemes her way into locker rooms and broomstick factories and red-carpet events, little green notebook always in hand. When she spots something interesting, she listens to her gut and chases it down.

Five years, ten years. Harry drops by for semi-regular guest lectures at Hogwarts, and Ginny walks down to Hogsmeade to meet him and pick up James and Al and Lily for the afternoon, so their little family can make their way up to the grounds and visit Neville in his greenhouses.

She goes to some of the Hogwarts Quidditch matches, too— ostensibly in the name of responsible youth sports reporting, but also because it always gives her a secret, giddy thrill to set foot back on this pitch, the first place she’d learned to look for herself again.

(There’s a stir the first time she and Harry show up in the professor’s box, a chorus of _is that? _and _no ways. _One frightened girl in green-hemmed robes scampers to the top of the stands and shoves a pen and paper at them, mumbling something Ginny can’t quite make out.

Ginny looks at her husband, amused. “Still got it, then, Potter? I thought the students would be used to you by now.”

“Oh, no,” he says, a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth, clearly enjoying himself. “They’re here for you.” )

***

The woman in the mirror has laugh lines around her eyes and mouth, strands of silver glinting in her Weasley-red hair.

Well-intentioned strangers like to tell Ginny’s children that they look just like their parents. “You’ve got your mother’s eyes,” they tell James, sigh over Al’s green eyes and black hair, smile and point out Lily’s Prewett colouring, her Weasley hair, her Evans grin.

When this happens, Ginny wants to snatch her children back. Of all the inheritances she will gift them, hair and eyes and name are least important.

_You are yourself, _Ginny tells her daughter, when strangers try to break her into pieces, fragments of all the Potters and Weasleys that had come before her. _Not me, not Lily Evans, not your mistakes or your reputation or your last name. You belong to yourself, and no one can ever steal you away. _

***

After the lights flicker out, after Ginny’s put aside her work for the evening and Harry’s cleared up the last of the dinner things, the Potter kids clamber all over their parents and beg for a bedtime story. Harry tells them about things that are real and true, three-headed dogs and baby dragons sneezing fire, golden eggs and mermaids, friendship and bravery and magic. 

Ginny invents her fairytales, spins them from thin air, conjures emotion and setting and plot. She tells her children about unicorns and Quidditch players, explorers and princesses.

_What happens in this one,_ Lily asks, wide-eyed, and Ginny will answer: in this story, the princess picks the lock and walks herself down all those stone stairs. This time around, she throws the key out the window and makes friends with the dragon. Lily Luna grows up with a hundred different princesses and peasant girls, one thousand and one ways for her to save herself.

There are still bad days. There will always be bad days, but as nineteen sun-dappled years pass they grow fewer and farther between. Ginny finds new cure-alls: mornings spent finding the sprinkles of grey in Harry’s stubble, the warm satisfaction of seeing her name in a byline, the walls of her house, their family’s house, heaving with magic and laughter and love.

When the shadows grow sharp and familiar, when she runs out of other people’s stories to tell, Ginny picks up her quill and writes her own.

**Author's Note:**

> this story has been living in my mind for so many years. thank you to jessie, for encouraging me to write it down, and for being willing to blithely discuss ginny's trauma with me in many a public place. 
> 
> for art/quotes/poems/fairytales that inspired this fic: pinkdementors.tumblr.com/tagged/stumble-on-a-secret-power
> 
> reviews are treasured. :-)


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